Köhler’s pomegranate plate shows Punica granatum, the shrub or small tree that bears the many-seeded red fruit. It’s plate 110 in Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, a German book of medicinal plants, and appears in volume 2, completed in 1890. It’s one of 2 plates the book gives the pomegranate. It was printed in color as a chromolithograph.
What the plate shows
The plate shows a flowering branch at natural size, with double flowers that have extra petals. Detail drawings show a flower cut lengthwise, the stamens, pollen, the ovary cut across and the top of the style. The book’s other pomegranate plate shows the fruit.
The book says Walther Müller drew the plate “from nature.”
The names
Linnaeus named the plant Punica granatum in 1753, and botanists still use the name. The word pomegranate comes from the Latin pomum granatum, “apple with many seeds.” The Romans called the fruit malum punicum, the Punic apple, after Carthage. That’s where Punica comes from.
Köhler places the pomegranate in the myrtle family. Botanists now put it in a different family, Lythraceae.
Pomegranate as medicine
Köhler calls the pomegranate one of the oldest medicinal plants. Pomegranates have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs, and the Hebrew Bible mentions them. The ancients used its root bark against worms, but modern doctors didn’t know about it until a man named Buchanan learned of its power in India. Köhler dates this to 1807.
By Köhler’s time, the bark of the root and stem was the main drug. It drove out tapeworm, thanks to 2 alkaloids, pelletierine and isopelletierine. Large doses caused dizziness. Köhler lists the root bark in 11 of the 12 pharmacopoeias his book covers. The dried rind and the dried flowers of the double form, the kind on this plate, were used for diarrhea.
The Pomegranate in our collection
The Pomegranate in our botanical art collection is a replica of this plate, finished by hand in our workshop.
